Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) (23 page)

Charlie looks at his wrist and calls out, “Thirty-three seconds!”

The small growl that comes out of Emily’s mouth tells me all I need to know and I back away as well, tossing the mask and bag toward Charlie as I do. He stands at the door, ready to bolt, but I need to see if the ropes will hold.

She wriggles on the floor, her body shifting side-to-side as if she can’t quite understand that one way doesn’t work or remember that it didn’t once she tries jerking up on the other side. Her eyes are glued to my face, more life in them than I’ve seen in two weeks.

“Emily?” I ask, hoping she’ll be like Sam.

Behind the leather gag, the growl grows in volume, edging up toward that peculiar keening scream the in-betweeners have. Nothing in her face shows recognition of the name. Nothing at all.

“It’s holding. You want me to get the mask?” Charlie offers, but he stays where he is, a death grip on the cage door. Being inside the cage with an in-betweener is a scary thing, even when it’s one we love.

I shake my head. “Nope, I’ve got it. Get ready,” I say.

She’s getting even more agitated, her brow wrinkling and her eyes rolling toward Charlie. She’s jerking at the ropes and I’d rather not dally until she works something loose. I reach down, grab the snaking ends of the tie that hold her gag in place and then yank one end sharply. Her head jerks to the side. Wrong one. I yank the other and feel the give of the tie coming loose. It slides across her lower face and around her head. I yank it again to get it away from her and she bares her perfect teeth in a snarl that almost makes me pee my pants.

We run out of the cage, slamming the door and wrapping the chain quickly. Once the lock is engaged and Charlie gives it a tug to be sure—we have a policy that a second person must always check the lock on the cages—we separate and go to our ropes. I don’t want her to hurt herself any more than she already is, so we both untie and pull out our ropes as gently as possible.

She screams as the ropes rub through the chains, confused and hungry, no doubt. The moment the ropes come free from her hands she flails her arms and sits up, reaching for Charlie. His rope slithers free a second later and he pulls it through the fence just as she reaches the end of her chains, slamming to her knees and losing her balance.

It’s all I can do to back away from her toward the barrier. The feelings I have at seeing her like this are conflicted, to say the least. She’s moving unsteadily, one side of her clearly afflicted by the tumor just as it was in life, but not nearly as much. She hasn’t been moving like this, with this kind of energy, for a long time. As terrible as it is to say, a part of me is happy to see her like this.

The rest of me, which is the largest part of me, is appalled and horrified. She’s not yanking the chains so much as constantly bouncing at the limits of them. Her hands have more leeway than her legs, but not much. It’s just enough extra to hope that she’ll catch her balance. The keening is constant and her teeth are clacking together so loudly, I fear they’ll break. All those years of braces will go to waste.

I grab the bag of birds waiting for us outside the barrier and bring it back to the cage. She sniffs, her nose searching the air until she hones in on the bag. Her good eye locks on it, the bad one looking somewhere off to the side.

She’s too riled up for me to want to open the cage and go in with her again, so I climb the ladder propped up against the cage and onto the chain-link top. It rattles, drawing her attention so that she stops jerking forward toward the opening in the barrier. Instead, she’s reaching up for me. I feel a bit like bait.

I stuff the birds, one by one, through the gaps in the links, trying to aim for the area between Emily and the wall so she’ll be able to reach them. She ignores me after the first one falls, dropping to sit with her legs outstretched. As each bird falls, she pauses just long enough to grab it very quickly and drop it on the floor so that her legs fence in the animals. It’s like she doesn’t want them to run away.

While she’s busy with that, I climb down and get behind the barrier. Charlie and I set the door piece back in place and then stand there, heads together as we watch her eating through the slit in the metal panel.

She’s completely absorbed by her meal, making horrible noises that sound like enjoyment as she bites in.

“I didn’t make it in time,” I whisper as softly as I can.

“No, but you know what to do now. We watch, measure and get there to see if we can find those mechanical critters as soon as we can.” He squeezes my shoulder just once, but it reassures me some, comforts me a little bit.

“I should have gone a month ago,” I say.

“You know you couldn’t. But, I understand a little better now. I saw how hard that was for you, and I saw your face when she turned. While I was in there, I sort of had a reality check. If we don’t figure out a way to fix this, we’ll all be doing this to people we love eventually. Either killing them so they don’t rise again or locking them up like animals because they’re sick. I was thinking of Jon.” He pauses, looks through the little gap at Emily for a moment and then back at me. He says, “And I’m coming with you to the base.”

I know I probably look pathetic when I glance up at him, grateful
and
pathetic, but I don’t care. I am grateful and I was terrified of the idea of going alone. With Charlie and his fast reflexes, his ability with the bow, and his hyper-vigilance, I stand a chance. Maybe a little one, but at least I won’t be alone.

“Thank you,” I whisper. I can feel the tears coming again, so I look at Emily one last time, then turn around and walk away.

Today - Home Again

Gloria is sleeping again, if only fitfully. She wakes at frequent intervals. Or rather, she starts into wakefulness and needs to be soothed and assured that she’s safe. Whatever happened to her was bad and we need medical help soon. I have no idea how she managed to survive out there, though at least I now know why her thumbs are broken. She broke them herself to get out of her handcuffs.

When she went to the bathroom, I heard her sounds of distress and barged in, not even knocking. She was making a high, pained sound as she peed and when I gave her some toilet paper I found in one of the bathrooms, her free fist clenched on her thigh when she wiped. It’s bad.

I have a better than vague notion of what goes on between men and women—I was thirteen and not five when it all went down, so I’d watched plenty of R-rated movies on the premium channel—but I have a hard time imagining what could have happened to cause what she’s going through. Whatever has happened, I’m not equipped to help her or fix anything that’s wrong.

I’ll say this for nothing. It’s put me off sex, for sure. I’ve been having some thoughts about Charlie recently, but those thoughts have pretty much flown right out the window and migrated north for the summer.

For now, she’s sleeping again and this time, her breathing sounds like she’s really out. My spare clothes won’t fit her, even as skinny as she is, and I don’t think she could bear wearing rough pants anyway, but we found some men’s basketball shorts and a t-shirt in a gym bag and she’s wearing those. I’ve washed her up as well as I can, but she’s a wreck, her face a mess of old and new bruises and wounds.

It’s got to be going on noon if the sky is any indicator, but it has gone cloudy outside and I could be imagining things. It feels like noon.

Gloria stirs and I freeze, but she’s just shifting positions and her eyes barely flutter. I turn back to the window and breathe onto the glass, writing the word
Hurry
into the resulting fog.

Whatever deities may be left in this world must hear me, because Savannah appears around the corner on one of the tricycles, the back loaded with the backboard Emily scavenged somewhere. The bright yellow of it is like a ray of sunshine breaking through and I smile, my hand pressing to the glass.

The deaders around the bank are now dead for sure. Between me on the roof and Charlie down below, we turned them into kabobs and then smashed their heads into smithereens. We haven’t seen the paper-chasing in-betweener since he wandered off, so I’ve stayed as alert as I can right here at the window since Charlie rode away.

Charlie comes up behind Savannah, his head on a swivel, on our second trike. No backboard this time, so I’m guessing that means I’ll get to ride on the delivery platform on the back. At least he took the box off.

Savannah doesn’t hesitate. I stand to look as straight down as I can out the window, but she doesn’t look up. When she stops the bike, she hops right off, grabbing the medical kit, a crossbow, and a rifle in a few smooth, economical motions. Her face is grim.

I hear Savannah’s boots clomp up onto the desk we shoved in front of the stairs and then onto the steps. When I look, Gloria’s eyes have popped open and fear is twisting her features.

Resting my uninjured hand on her arm, I smile and say, “It’s okay. It’s Savannah and Charlie. They’ve come back to help. To take you home.”

For a moment, she just stares at me blankly, then her face crumples and she gurgles a word I can’t truly understand, but I think it’s, “Home.”

I nod and agree, “Yes. Home.”

*****

Maribelle is pitching a fit. Gloria made it clear during a series of emphatic scribbling sessions—which she had to do with only her fingers holding a pencil because her thumbs are jacked up—that she didn’t want Maribelle to see her in her current condition. She wanted to get cleaned up a little so that she wouldn’t scare her daughter. It’s going to be hard enough for Maribelle when she realizes her mother can’t speak anymore, but seeing her like she is now, covered in grime and blood, not to mention smelling indescribably bad, might push her over the edge into something she can’t get over.

And really, isn’t the world bad enough?

But, she’s really pissed. I mean, holding her breath, biting my arm, and kicking my shin into next Tuesday mad. How she managed to get up to the window to look out and see Gloria hobbling in I still don’t know. But kids haven’t changed just because the world ended and they will still invariably find a way to do exactly what you don’t want them to do.

She’s in full howl when the door opens and Charlie pokes his head in warily. He nods me over and at the door, he says, “Gloria’s face is cleaned up and she’s just going to keep the rest of her body covered. Bring Maribelle. She’s so loud you can probably hear her down the road.”

I turn around and grab Maribelle up, startling her into silence for a moment. When she looks at me in alarm, I put on my sternest face and say, “We’re going, but not because you were screaming. All that screaming did was tell every deader in a mile radius where there’s a juicy meal!”

Her mouth pops closed immediately and her face goes from angry to alert and listening in a hot second. She’s a child of this new world and knows full well what I’m saying.

That’s mean and I know it, but this isn’t the kind of world where temper tantrums can be allowed, no matter the provocation. And my truthful words are nothing compared to the measures taken by others when things were at their worst. Just telling the truth is a leisure compared to back in the bad old days of the newly-fallen apocalypse. I know how lucky we were at Sam’s, with Jon, Penny and Piper being so quiet and with so little need to shush them.

Just two days before Sam found me, I watched a man shoot what I think was his own kid. He shot him right in the head because he was screaming and wouldn’t stop. I think it was his son because the woman with him carried another boy and the look on her face said she would never forgive the man for what he had just done. But the three that remained alive got away and the in-betweeners that had them trapped went for the newly dead boy and not them. It’s a bad world. Bad.

I wouldn’t shoot Maribelle. The world has improved—or at least emptied a little—since then. But that doesn’t mean I can let her go crazy, either.

She finally nods at me and her chin trembles. Her voice is a little hoarse and croaky from all her screaming when she says, “I want my mommy.”

“I know sweetie, but you know how sometimes you had to hide when bad things or bad people were nearby?”

She nods, her hand coming up to her ear in the way she does when she’s unsure.

“Well, your mom had to hide for a while and she’s very tired and a little bit hurt. So you need to be quiet and careful. Don’t jump on her. Okay?”

Again, she nods and I bounce her on my hip to get her more settled. She’s way too big to carry like this but she’s in a vulnerable state, so I carry her even though it feels like I’m carrying Charlie. Her feet bang together around my opposite hip she’s so tall.

Gloria is ensconced in another warehouse, where we had thought we might hide her until she was presentable for Maribelle. The door creaks loudly as it opens and the pool of light marking her location beckons us forward. I let Maribelle down and take the flashlight from her. She takes off at a run toward the light.

“Remember to be gentle!” I call out behind her, but she doesn’t answer.

I take my time walking up to them, dallying at the edges of the light to give them time. Savannah’s voice rises amongst the murmurs and cries a couple of times as she keeps Maribelle in check. But for Maribelle, whose mother has been gone for a very long time and who we all had assumed was dead—though we never specifically told Maribelle that—it’s too much for caution.

Her little girl crying is hard and breathy. It echoes around the furniture warehouse, even though it’s filled with lots of things that should absorb some of the vibrations. Hearing it is hard and I find myself crying along with her, hidden as I am in the darkness just beyond their little pool of light. Savannah is highlighted in the lantern light for a moment then she walks toward me, joining me in the gloom.

“I don’t think we’re going to get Maribelle away from her for a while, but we need to. I’ve got some work to do on her yet,” she says, giving me a significant look.

“Emily,” I say. It’s all I need to say. She knows.

“You’ve seen her. She’s fine. Or as fine as she can be anyway. Wait until tomorrow. You’ll need light anyway.”